Hi, everyone, Welcome to conversations. I had never heard of Mary Fortune, to my shame, because she was a very prominent author in the nineteenth century, wrote crime fiction, one of the first female writers to do so, if not the first, and it's a really interesting story. Her life unfolds in many ways. She gets married twice without getting divorced the first time, she goes to the goldfields, and she lives in that bahomium lifestyle of nineteenth century Melbourne
in the literary world. Then her son plays out some of the crime stories that she actually wrote. There's a biography about Mary Fortune, and our next guest is one of the authors. Lucy Sussex, joins us. Lucy, thanks your time, thank you, thank you for having me. What a great name. Lucy Sussex.
Contemplated that it's not quite as as as good a name as Mary Fortune, though, because when we started a search we thought it was like a pseudonym and it wasn't.
Look, we'll talking about you in a bit more depth as we go on, but I look at your biography and you're so versatile. I mean, write fantasy and science fiction, you write children's books, you write nonfiction and true crime. As you're an editor, a viewer, you are a teacher. I mean, which of those genres do you?
I guess it's I guess it's a hat because when I started off, I started off with doing a science fiction workshop and that got me into science fiction and very small field. But then somebody children's editor read one of my science fiction stories and said, why don't you try writing for children? And I didn't get it right on the first attempt, but I got it right on the second, and that was my first book, first book.
And then somebody asked me to write horror, and I thought, that is so not my thing, but I'll give to go. And then I got a job working for Stephen Knight. Because I trained as a librarian and the job market was a bit tight, I thought, let's go sideways. So I saw an ad for a researcher for Stephen Knight, who was a professor at Melbourne University who had grant money, and he was writing a history of Australian crime fiction,
the first one ever done. And so I had this wonderful job by which I'd go off to the library and I just read all these vintage antique crime books and then report if there was anything interesting about them? I mean whether they were any good or whether they were really bad, but they were historically important. And one of the tasks he gave me I was, who is this person said to be Mary Fortune? Said to be
a woman? Can you find out anything about her? And that's when the research started, and that got me into writing, firstly nonfiction and then true crime.
There's so many questions come from that little response she gave me. Then we'll come to Mary Fortune in a second. But how do you write science fiction when you're not a scientist or you're not a aerospace engineer. How do you do that? Yeah?
Well it helps to read New Scientist magazine because you good ideas. And then there's a three useful trick which HG. Wells pioneered. He wrote the time Machine, which is if this goes on, so you take a trend and in society and go if this continues and it gets worse, what's going to happen? And that's a really interesting trick. There's a US writer called Octavia Butler. She's dead now, but she wrote The Powerballs of the Sawer and she did this trick and it's really uncanny how it's how
it's unfolding in the US like that right now. But the other thing is, if you don't have a science background, always have somebody someone to check your check to see whether you haven't made any hideous mistakes.
Popular science magazine is the is the motivation for it. I used to get that, but I didn't feel like I had to write fiction science fiction.
Oh well, I went to I went to this workshop with George Turner. It's on how to write science fiction. And Turner wrote The Sea in Summer, which is in nineteen eighty seven, which was a major climate change novel, and again he looked at climate change and thought, if this goes on, and but George sort of basically said, be your own critic, being rigorous, and that was a really good, good way to good you know, you were learning from the best.
So nineteen eighty seven he wrote that has how precient was and how how much of that fiction has come true?
Well, he's got Melbourne, you know, it's inundated and the high rises. The US addition is called drowning to hours, and there's an unemployed underclass, and it's all really grim but it's still got but it's it's sort of life affirming if you under them what I mean.
So you're born in New Zealand.
Yeah, yeah, I'm a Kiri, but my parents were Australian and so my pretty much all of my grandparents and great grandparents were walking Melbourne at the same time as Mary Fortune was. So I learned to love nineteenth century Melbourne from her descriptions and her journalism and crime fiction of what the city was like, and that it's just a really good picture. And also she writes about the goldfields very vividly too.
What were your parents doing in New Zealand?
Oh, dad got a job there, and I had a great grandmother who had emigrated to New Zealand in the eighteen nineties. Depression in Australia and Melbourne was really tough, So half the family went to Wa and half the family went to New Zealand.
What did you What did your dad do?
He taught French?
He taught French? Yeah, well romantic is that? Did he serve in France? Did he?
No? He studied. He did a law degree at Melbourne Uni and discovered he hated the law and thought about what he did like doing, and then it was French. So he basically went for worked for a year teaching and then he got a he got a scholarship to go to France and study and to do a PhD. And so he became an academic and that took him all in all sorts of places.
Did it rub off on you?
I haven't quite. I haven't got I haven't got the foreign language gene. But my brother Rowley, who does who does radio for ABC, he's a Slavonic linguist and he can he can pick up a language very, very easily. He's got about five or six.
So what age do you come back to Australia.
As a teenager and dad got a job in far North.
Queensland, Far North Queensland.
Yeah, Townsville.
You're a teenager in Townsville. What was it like?
Well, it was I didn't like the climate. It was you know, when you've got enough problems being a teenager without moving house abruptly to an entirely different climate and a different place. And yeah. So and that's how I got into reading science fiction because I was in the library and you could read about really dark stuff like J. G. Beallard when there was a just there was a I was reading science fiction in the library because you could
get out of your head and into another place. And that was what science fiction did, which was my early interest in it.
Science fiction and horror. Though there's an impact on your mental.
Health, I'd say it's quite bad. And being a teenager, I understand. I mean, I'm not a I'm not a splatter fan, but I like ghost stories. I mean there's really good Australian ghost stories and some New Zealand ones too.
Lucy Sussex is my guest, folks. She is the co writer of a book called Outrageous Fortune about Mary Fortune. It's a true story about this lady who wrote crime and crime fiction in the nineteenth century Melbourne, but an interesting life she had before all of that. Back after the break, Welcome back to conversations, everybody. If you just tuned in, I'm speaking to Lucy Sussex, an author with a great name. That's not a student m isn't it. That's your real name?
You didn't, Yep, that's my real name.
It's a great name and a prolific author of very varying genres. But her book that we're talking about today is Outrageous Fortunes. It's the adventures of Mary Fortune, who was a crime writer in the tenth century. Melbourne. Tell us about this Mary Fortune. I mean she was she's born in Ireland.
Yeah, she was born in Belfast in the eighteen thirties and her father father, her mother died after she was born, and her father went. He was traveling around Ireland I think were as working as a civil engineer, and during the famine they went, they moved, they went across the Atlantic to Quebec and he was working on the railways. And so she married a young so his name was Wilson's. You try doing any research and to anybody called Wilson,
he was George Mary. It's really difficult to trace. But she married a surveyor called Joseph Fortune, which was a much more distinctive name, and that's how she became Mary Fortune. And they had one son, and then her father, George. The eighteen fifty one gold Russian Melbourne and Victoria happened and that was huge although and people from all over the world immigrated. So he came down, came to Victoria, and after a couple of years she followed with her son.
And the evidence is that there was trouble in her marriage and she took her child and ran and.
So this is Mary's mother.
Yeah, this is this is Mary Fortune and her son by Joseph Fortune.
Okay, well I missed, I missed the part where she got married.
Oh so so she married a surveyor called Joseph Fortune.
And then that was with that in candidate.
Yeah, that was. That was that was in Quebec. And the trouble with Quebec was that divorce was difficult in the nineteenth century because so most people. So there's a lot of bigger me going on, which I'll get on too, but people just vanished and then turned up again. And so you know, hopped on a ship crossed so from you know, West Australia to South Australia and just conveniently forgot that they had a family and got married again.
You know, this thing happened a lot. So she joined her father on the gold fields, and she later writes a memoir of the gold fields. He wasn't a digger, he was a he was a storekeeper by then, but he was a man in his fifties. It was probably too hard work for really hard physical work. And then the story gets really weird.
She writes accounts of life on the gold fields yeah, and I suppose now it's a distant it's our distant history. We probably studied it at one stage. How did she see it? How did she portray it?
She actually portrayed it. She was as a period of freedom because women in middle class, nice ladies in the nineteenth century and all of a sudden you're into this crater escape of people furiously digging. And she said it was so free because you didn't have to observe appearances so much, and some of the social strictures weren't applicable, and so she really liked living in the Australian colonies. And she was also pro, very much pro the Eureka stockage.
She caught it, and of course it was pretty much right. She arrived in Melbourne the year after it happened, and she was writing. She was writing poetry and some of it was quite revolutionary, and she sent it to the local paper on the gold Fields and they printed it and then they said, oh, under her initials m HF.
And they said, oh, well, you know MHF will call it at the office and at his earliest convenience, and so you know, she turns up in a quinnoline with a small child, and they say, oh, well, we were in need of a sub editor. We thought that MHF he might have suited. But of course not many female journalists at that stage, so she didn't get the job. Had she got it, she would have been a bit like Catherine Helen Spence, pioneering in that area area. But instead she turned into a crime writer.
But in the meantime she remarries without having a divorce. She had a child before she remarried or subsequent.
Yes, the year after she arrives in Australia, she has a child and we don't know who the father is, but anything could have happened on the goldfields and her eldest child died and so she called this child by the same name, George, and he grew up to be a career criminal. But when he was only two she married a policeman. She married a mounted trooper on the
Australian Goldfield's called Percy Brett. They both lied about lied on the marriage certificate here about his age, and they both and she that she'd been married before and had children, which is something that you were supposed to fill out.
My grandfather was an Anglican clergyman and in the early years of his He says that if he was conducting a marriage with people who are widowed, he would ask them to write in the you know, just when they were widowed and where, just to cover himself in case they might be in crust, they might be legal problem, because this sort of thing was absolutely rife and the colonies. You know, Daisy Baits, she made two big of his marriages. You know, she married Break morand and then she marries
two other guys in quick succession. You know, it was just it just happened because people couldn't get divorced. But her marriage to Percy Brett doesn't last long. He probably found out her son was illegitimate or that she had a husband in Canada. But from him she got to know a lot about the police on the gold Fields, and she becomes fascinated by how they operated in the days.
So she knows what it's like to be in the era before forensics and how they would catch what their lives were like, and the sort of things they did and how they caught criminals. And she's one of the few women in the nineteenth century with that knowledge. And eventually she came about ten years later, she comes to use it.
But what sort of person was she? I mean, you're talking about the various times of the scrape she had with the police, like drunkenness and disorderly and the like. But at the same time she seems quite well educated and moves quite comfortably within a middle class of society.
Well, her father wrote poetry, and we know that. And and yes, she knows French, she may know a little bit of she may know Latin. She can write in the voice of a male of the era quite convincingly.
So did she Why did she feel she had to write in the voice of a male like some of the other great female authors.
It was just sort of anonymity. Women was supposed to belong to the house and be domestic. That the angel in the house was the ideal, despite the fact that you know the most that the most powerful person in the British Empire was a woman, Queen Victoria. I mean, that was the ideal, But in fact, a lot of women would make extra money writing for writing fiction, like the Bronzes and like George George Eliott, who was really
Mary Ann Evans. But Mary Fortune was writing police fiction and she was doing this in the first person, so She was probably the first woman to write in the voice of the police and her detective Mark Sinclair, and has the same voice in some of her just the rights woman centric journalism as well color pieces as they call it, and the voices are very similar. But it's someone who's very irreverent, who's got a black sense of humor, who's got guts, who's a little bit of a loner.
So this is this is the main character of her stories.
But also you can see the same persona in her when she's writing autogiographical pieces as well. And she doesn't mention that she's well, it's proven that she was had up sent to jail for being drunk in Melbourne. And you know, you know, if you'd had an illegitimate child, you have led a rough life on the gold fields, you know, you might you know, you might be given to drowning your sorrows now and then. And colonial alcohol is incredibly strong, so you know, she.
She seems a bit of a loose lady to me. I mean it just without knowing it. I'm just from your descriptions, she seems rather loose with her morals.
I don't know if you call that. I mean, she's of course, Well, how did you call it? I don't know. I mean sort of bohemian is how is how she's a couple of people described it, and.
That means, well, there's a certain useless of morality.
Oh yeah, but I mean she might not have had an illegitimate child by choice. Because also she writes about rape, including gang rape on the gold Fields. And she's the only nineteenth century writer I know who does write about gang who women writer who does write about it? And and this is an era when women are supposed to be mider class women supposed to be so delicate and high mind to not know about such things. But she can because she's got the persona of a cop, and
so she can write about these things. But explicitly, I think say that she's a free spirit and a bit wild. And yeah, she should have been born in the nineteen sixties. She could have been a hippie.
It sounds like she was fun.
I think she was. She comes across, as you know, and she addresses you directly, and you think, now you could here's someone who had been really interesting. And if they took you on a guide a tour of Melbourne, nineteenth century of Melbourne, it would have been one hell of a tour.
Lucy's Sussex is my guest co author of a book about Mary Fortune called Outrageous Fortunes. Back shortly, Welcome back to conversations, everybody, Now, if you've just tuned in, we're talking to an academic lady, an author. Right, many various genres and I've just read them. Fantasy, science fiction, children's and teenage writing, nonfiction, true crime. Which of those do you prefer, Lucy Sussex.
I get. I enjoy writing all of them because I enjoy writing and I like but I like researching, and that's partly why I got into Mary Fortune, because of being a researcher. And my co writer Megan Brown, she's also a searcher, so we had much time in archives.
It sounded as she was Mary Fortune was difficult to research. There am I writing saying.
That, yes, started off with just the name and that the suggestion that she was a woman. But luckily she'd written this autobiographical fiction for the Australian Journal, which was all over Australia. It had a very wide distribution and that was It lasted in the eighteen sixty five until the nineteen until nearly the Night until the nineteen sixties.
She wrote for that and so initially she was so she began writing poetry, but then she but she also had these autographographical pieces and from that you could find out quite a lot about her. She wrote under the pseudonym but for about the Goldfields quite vividly, and you
could have pis things together. And the real clue to her name was that she arrives arriving in Melbourne in eighteen fifty five with a small boy who's never named, but in a piece of journalism about what she did on Christmas Day in eighteen sixty eight, she's wandering around Melbourne with another boy and she says he's never seen the sun before, such as the sea before. And I thought, okay, well, well maybe if he can't be her, can't be her son, that first child, So it must have been the other.
Maybe you know, she had another child, Maybe she remarried. Maybe that first child died, because why would a boy
not be with his mother on Christmas Day? So I went looking through the microfilmed births, deaths and marriages, and I found a little boy called George's Fortune, who died in Central Victoria in eighteen fifty eight and his mother was given as Mary hed On, a fortune born in Belfast, and from that I had her father's name, her mother's name when she got married, and that was that was and that was the first time we had her full name.
And then you could go on from there. You know, you had to do a bibliography, which was.
How long does it hell does it take to pour through all of that stuff, those records? How long does it take you to find something like the actual name? And is that a Eureka moment for you? Well?
Is that was one afternoon which we had the Eureka moment, but found out she wrote over five hundred stories and so you had to do a list of that. Then you had to read them, and Megan and I had to read them at least twice. And then quite late in the re search we found via trove, you know, wonderful trove, long may it be funded. We found out there was another pseudonym and another ninety items. So we just had to stop writing and start reading again, and
you know, that was another Eureka moment. But there was a lot of hard slogging and going down and going down rabbit holes and not finding anything there and it took about it took it took decades really to get it. And the thing that made the difference was that the digitization of newspapers and records and censuses so that you could actually look up information. And we're working during the pandemic and it couldn't leave the house, but you know,
you could still get hold of the sense. The Ulster Historical Society of Records have just gone online and wow, so I could visit, So I could visit Belfast and in virtuality, if not actuality, and find out stuff.
This might seem like a rude question, Lucy, what do you do for fun? Me? Oh, don't tell me that's fun.
Actually it is, It really is, because it's it's like the thrill of a chase, of a cult chase. No, I'm interested in birds, and I'm interested in bushwalking and music and all sorts, all sorts of things. Lately, I've been to South Australia. I've been to the for the writer this week, but also for the for the Adelaide Festival for the music. So and I lived with the wine buff So lots of interest.
So we come back to Mary Fortune and she writes the first the Detectives album. Now this this is a significant publication, isn't it. Can you can you explain what the Detective's album?
Okay, it's a serial in the published in the Australian Journal. So and that's the the Australian Journal.
Just interrupting. Sorry, that was like a national yeah, probably like a.
Newspaper magazine and so it's like a fiction magazine like they used to have until radio came along and TV and that was distributed in all the colonies, including New Zealand, which was then the seventh Australian colony, and it went everywhere,
so she had a huge readership. But the Detective's Album, the conceit behind that was that it's a detective police detective who keeps an album of photographs of people whom he's convicted and arrested and convicted and he's writing up his memoirs and this is what he uses so each so this is this album, and this is slightly before the police actually start using compiling their own visual records of criminals. So she's in advance here. She saw what
was happening. And this starts in the eighteen sixties and it lasts almost until her death.
It's a weekly publication.
It started off weekly and then it became monthly. So there's over five hundred detective album stories. Apart from a blip for a few years, this lasts for forty years. It's the longest known detective crime series worldwide. There's nothing like it. And this goes on for It's so popular that everybody that you know that the magazine has to keep her on staff, even if she's a bit wild at times.
So it's a serial.
It's short story. You think about Sherlock Holmes and the series of short stories novellas which came out or so it's not novels. So it's short, short fiction. But she can stretch it to about sometimes twenty thousand words and she'd do that every month. That she'd keep it up for years.
Twenty thousand words. She had a month to write that.
I suppose you can do that, and sometimes I think she was very close to deadline. She had to had to dash off to the printers in the middle of the night.
Paid for something like that.
Well, the thing is that there's one of her editors that there's an attitude at the Australian Journal, a man called Ron Campbell, who was a crime and rich fiction writer himself. He said that she probably wrote more and got paid less than any other contemporary writer. And this is because she was a woman, and that at the time women journalists were paid less than males, and there
wasn't equity in the level of pay. And so people like Marcus Clark, who was whom she knew and was a literary rival of hers, he was paid reasonably well, but still he died under difficult circumstances. But she was a great survivor. And because she could write crime, but she also wrote women's journalism and novels, she could turn her hand to various things. So she managed to keep on writing for forty years, even though the occasional day job was recorded that she was a governess. She was
a housekeeper on stations armas in Victoria. She was you know, she had she was able to have side jobs, but she had it because she had her vocation was writing, but she had, but she needed a day job a lot of the time.
All this has done in long hand, isn't it freestyle?
Yep, there's only one example of her. There's only one letter of hers known to survive, and that's when she's very old. And her handwriting stateria writing because her eyesight's going. But yeah, it was all written in long hand, and then you'd take it to the print works and then the compositor would set it into type and they'd do a dummy run. They'd print it on paper and then they'd check it for miss Princes and then then then the magazine would be printed printed by hand the way
it used to be. So yes, there's, there's Yeah. It was entirely different in those days.
So she wrote with a shudon and mainly as a portraying herself as a male, as a man. Did now was she ever outer? Did she out herself? Was she Was it a matter of somebody discovering her or was it just the natural progression?
Well, at one stage she was very nearly outed because her son George had got into bad company when he was young and it progressed and he robbed her back and in eighteen eighty five in Melbourne, and this was one of the biggest heists of that era, and it lasted for decades, but in the sense that people would be who involved in it would be hanged for other crimes, so it was very much before the public and somebody actually named was missus Fortune because they had the same surname,
George Mary Fortune and George Fortune. And after that she added an extra F to her name, a Welsh spelling fortune with two f's, which caused lots of problems later when people are trying to find her death date and they were looking under fortune with one F and they could only find it and and I found it eventually, partly by accident, and found it under two f's. But yeah, she was close to being outed, but never was quite never was completely exposed. She was a woman of mystery.
Lucy Sussex is my guest as one of the authors of Outrageous Fortunes about this amazing lady was amazing. Interesting is probably a better word. I think Mary Fortune, crime writer. You mentioned her son. We'll talk about him when we come back, because he sort of lived out her real life crime. Back shortly, folks, we're speaking today with Lucy Sussex. Lucy's an author of many and varied genres, and she just loves books and reading and researching and delving into
libraries and things. Actually, you have anme of librarianship. Yeah, I always thought that would be interesting. Being a librarian.
Yeah, and actually became a reference librarian, which means you're answering questions and you'd have to be on your feet because somebody would ask you about can I grow peanuts in Melbourne? And then the next question might be about.
And you grow peanuts in Melbourne?
Who you can? Probably best in the greenhouse, I think, But with climate change, you know, you just have to you'd have to be on your feet and I and that really was fun. It's a bit exhausting, but yeah, so but the skills I learned from that. Then I turned to her work and that was really thinking. You had to think where might I go to find this information?
But look back to Mary. We've mentioned her son, we've introduced her him to the narrative. Now he plays out true crime. He's a scoundrel, isn't He's a.
Yeah, Megan, Megan said to me, well, you know, she really wanted to like.
And me.
And thing is Megan her day job is working at teaching in the criminal juvenile criminal justice system of New South Wales, so she knows a bit about the subject and she knows how kids can just go off the rail and a lot of what George's experience I think is very relevant now and that you get a kid who's a bit disadvantaged and gets into bad company and is maybe a bit lonely, then gets into the whole mythos of being a crim and can't get out of it because this is their friends. What do they do?
And he when he's fourteen, he gets arrested for stealing a hat and normally and so he went into the juvenile justice system and from that he never quite There was a four year period in which he wasn't but then he kept on getting in trouble and being incarcerated. He's a thief. He picks he picks locks. You know, they could have trained and become a locksmith and he probably would have done quite well at that. So he's
involved in a bank bank robbery. There's another robbery in which there's which there's banello in Victoria in which they steal are safe from a hotel and they put it into a wheelbarrow to take it to someone where they can attack it open it without anybody seeing. So there's this bunch of blokes with reeling a wheelbarrow down the main street at one in the morning and somebody looks out the window and thinks, Oh, it's just some blokes taking their mate home he's had too much to drink.
I had to research how you went about cracking a safe in the nineteenth century. And the thing is that she put this, she put this into a story of hers, in which there is a safe, a status and the wheelbarrow details. She puts it into a story of hers.
So she recounts her son's escapades.
She's like, she's like, she's she's using her memories of her husband, and then she's using this sort of stuff her son is getting up to, and you know, just for copy, and you think this is really weird. Here's a crime writer and then there's true crime in the family,
and it's like they're pulling in opposite directions. But in her latest story, she's very much concerned with the notion of reform, in that what can you do with someone who's a marked criminal and the police know him, and that he's a usual suspect and can be arrested, and with some of his things for which he was arrested, we've got no idea whether he actually did it or whether he was just just conveniently picked up by the police.
The son did he reform and live happily ever after.
There was a four year period when he was he'd been assigned to a farmer, and he was quite good. He was good for about four years and then somebody asks them to help hide the stash of us of a robbery there, and he does that and he gets an anstime. He sent to adult prison. And it's not I've seen his handwriting. He wrote a good hand He's intelligent.
When he was had up with the bank robbery, he wrote a letter to the judge and handed it to the judge playing asking for leniency because his mother was an old woman. And it's a very well written letter, and the judge gave it to the press, and it was reprinted in colonies, in all the number of colonial newspapers. So he was not she'd been. She'd brought him up to read and write and Noah's Bible, and she'd done the best best that she could to equip him as
a single mother. But it was but you know, things were really tough. That's that's when you're bring up a boy alone. And the boy is a bit mischievous, as she notes, and what can you do if they get off the rails in these days it's cognitive behavioral therapy sometimes works and that's probably the most successful thing, but it costs money, and the prison system is stressed, and he does try to make good. He goes to Tasmania.
He thinks he'll get away from it all. But of course the police and Tasmania are why to say, look, here's this criminal. He's coming to tasmais keep your eyes out. And on the same ship as on the boat to Tasmania, there's another criminal who he knew from Pentridge Prison and within a very short time there's a robbery and then to Hobart jail. So he's just as much known to the Tasmanian police as he is to the Hobart police.
And he's just he's a bit of a wag. He picks his lock in Hobart prison and of course they give him an extra sentence for that, and they give him put him in solitary in the middle of winter, you know, bread and water and no blankets. But that probably contributes to his death. And he dies without ever being released again in his in his fifties.
How did Mary's demise? Did she live out a happy life?
The end of her life was happy. I think she felt herself to be. She was a bit of a batler. At the end of her life, the pension came in. She had the opportunity to vote, and so she's on the electoral roles, I mean South Australia first, then New Zealand, then Victoria. So she's on the electoral roles and she's eligible for the pension. But the trouble is that it's when the first pension is the things and it's depended on good conduct and can you prove sobriety a period
of years, and of course she can't. This is pretty rough on people who are given that the how much of the Australian population like a tipple, And so she can't get the pension and she ends up in What's and she's losing her eyesight so she can't write, and she ends up in a and a charitable institution. But with the Federal pensions, they when they bring that in in nineteen ten, that's for everyone, regardless of whether they've
whether they're sober or not. And so she has the money at the end of her life, and her employers at the Australian Journal, they ensure that there's a nurse to look after her because she's in Feebod and she dies in nineteen eleven and she's buried at the expense of the proprietors of the Australian Journal in Springvale Cemetery in an unmarked grave.
There's a photo you standing by that that grave was at a somber moment for you.
It felt very strange. It does because I've been searching for a death record for so long. But I literally
did that. I visited in the morning and then I basically drove up to a conference in Ballarat, the Australian Touring Studies give a paper announce the death rate, and then there's a there's a young lady from South Australia, a students sitting in the audience and she opens up her laptop and in question time she gets onto Austin the Australian Literature database for which she's doing some work for, and she updates it with Mary Fortune's record with the
death date death date within minutes. And you have to say that that's the wonders of technology.
And that so she heard you, Yeah, she was present, she heard you. Then she put it on the database.
Yeah, and there it is in the public eye. Within minutes.
We've come to the end, Lucy, and people need to buy the book if they're fascinated by this fascinating lady. And it's a it's Australian history too. I think it's significant she filled an important role. Good job with it. Thank you so much for joining.
Us, and thank you so much for having me.
Lucy Sussex was my guest, folks, co author of Outrageous Fortunes. It's the story the adventures of Mary Fortune, crime writer and a little bit about her son who ended up a career criminal as well. Thank you so much for joining us.